The Parsed Corpus of
Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)
PCMEP Text Information
Floris and Blancheflour
Back to PCMEP texts
About the text:
About the edition and manuscript base:
About the file:
Other:
| Text name: | Floris and Blancheflour | ||||||||
| Alternative names: | Ne thirst man never in land; Floris / Floriz / Floire and Blanchflour / Blauncheflour / Blaunchflour / Blanchefleur / Blanchfleur / Blaunchefleur / Blaunchfleur / Blancheflur / Blanchflur / Blauncheflur / Blaunchflur / Blancheflor / Blanchflor / Blauncheflor / Blaunchflor; | ||||||||
| Content: | Floris, the exiled son of the king of Spain, and Blaunchfleur, who has been sold to a villain called the Admiral, are madly in love with each other (lost beginning). Floris is distraught in an inn on account of being separated from Blaunchfleur so that the host sends him to Daris for advice (lines 1-150). Daris tells Floris about the Admiral's tower in which Blaunchfleur is held and gives him advice on how to break in by bribing the porter with an ornate cup (lines 151-404). With the porter's aid, Floris enters the tower hidden in a flower pot, is discovered by Blaunchfleur's friend Claris and, overjoyed, reunites with Blaunchfleur (lines 405-554). Blaunchfleur spends so much time in bed with Floris that she misses appointments with the Admiral who, suspicious, eventually discovers the two lovers and has them arrested (lines 555-638). To judge the prisoners, the Admiral convenes a council, which upon quarrelling over a magic ring, admiring the beauty of the two lovers and hearing Floris' charming backstory, decides to pardon them (lines 639-776). Floris marries Blaunchfleur, is knighted by the Admiral, who takes Claris as his own wife, and, having learned of his father's death, returns to Spain to rule the country as king (lines 777-824). | ||||||||
| Genre/subjects: | romance, love, gest, chivalry, separation and reunion | ||||||||
| Dialect of original composition: | East-Midlands McKnight (1901: xxxix-xli) attempts to identify the dialect of the original. Noting that it is "difficult to distinguish certain criteria of dialect on account of the variety of orthography in the different manuscripts" and that evidence from rhymes is "not entirely uniform for the different texts" (ibid.: xxxix), he concludes that "we may feel fairly safe in attributing Fl. and Bl. to the East Midland" (ibid.: xli). The original was composed "in the East Midland, farther north than King Horn" (Wells 1916: 139). De Vries (1966: 39) localizes the dialect to the southeast Midlands. | ||||||||
| Date of original composition: | 1250-1290 The earliest witness of the text is the late 13th century manuscript London, British Library Cotton Vitellius D.III. The text must therefore have been in existence before that time. "We shall probably be safe in setting the date of composition in the second half of the 13th century" (McKnight 1901: xli), more precisely towards its last quarter about 1275 (De Vries 1966: 50). That a common ancestor of the text for its 4 manuscript witnesses must exist is proven by shared material between [C], the manuscript used for the parsed file, and the other manuscripts, such as the following:
On the other hand, [C] abounds in unique lines diverging from the other manuscripts, as illustrated below (see also stemma in McKnight 1901: xliv):
This suggests that parts of [C] are a substantially new recension of the text and could have been composed closer to the manuscript date of about 1300 than to the estimated date of the original of 1275. | ||||||||
| Suggested date: | 1285 | ||||||||
| PCMEP period: | 2a (1250-1300) | ||||||||
| Versification: | couplets, two-line, aa, usually short 3 or 4-stress lines for comments, see McKnight 1901: xlii. | ||||||||
| Index of ME Verse: | 2288.8 (IMEV), 2288.8 (NIMEV) | ||||||||
| Digital Index of ME Verse: | 3686 | ||||||||
| Wells: | 1.99 | ||||||||
| MEC HyperBibliography: | Floris |
About the edition and manuscript base:
| Edition: | McKnight, George H. 1901. King Horn, Floriz and Blauncheflur, The Assumption of our Lady. EETS o.s. 14. London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. 80-110 (second column). |
| Manuscript used for edition: | Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Library Gg.4.27 (Part 2), ff. 1r-5v |
| Online manuscript description: | University of Cambridge Digital Library Late Medieval English Scribes (Part 1, does not contain Floris and Blancheflour) eLALME (Linguistic Profile 6800) |
| Manuscript dialect: | Southern The dialect of the manuscript has been identified as Hampshire (Allen 1988: 99) or Berkshire (McIntosh et al. 1986: 67). It was perhaps written in Winchester (De Vries 1966: 44-50). |
| Manuscript date: | s.xiii-ex, s. xiv-in Originally thought to be "of the latter half of the 13th century" (McKnight 1901: xxviii), a "consensus of opinion now gives a date of 'around 1300'" (Allen 1988: 103, with relevant references in footnote 14). The Middle English Dictionary dates the manuscript "c.1300." |
About the file:
| File name: | 2a.FlorBlanch |
| ID: | FlorBlanch,x.y.z: x=page, y=line, z=token |
| Word count: | 4,948 |
| Token count: | 455 |
| Line count: | 825 (including a line for the final "Explicit") |
Other:
| General notes: | The poem has been preserved in the following 4 manuscripts.
The version in [V] has also been annotated and parsed as part of the P-LAEME project (file: vitelld3t.psd). [V] has many lacunas and uncertain readings while [C] is relatively coherent. [V] contains 1,954 words vs. [C]'s 4,948 words. Almost all of the non-fragmentary material in [V] is duplicate content with [C], as illustrated below.
The text Floris and Blancheflour enjoyed great popularity in the Middle Ages with renderings extant in many European languages. Old French brought about two versions of the story (French I and French II in McKnight (1901: xxxii)). The Middle English poem is based on the Old French I version. For comments on the historical transmission of the text, see Tassetto (2014), McKnight (1901: xxx-xxxvii). | |||
| Remarks on parses: | The line breaks follow the metre as in McKnight's (1901: 80-110) edition. Hortative expressions of the type "Go we" are parsed as IP-IMP with an overt first person plural subject (e.g., line 502). A noteworthy conservative feature is the use of a genitive quantifier, "Ower beire cumpaignie" (line 534) 'the company of you both', which is parsed together with the possessive as NP-POS, (PRO$ Ower) (Q$ beire). Some difficult readings are indicated as Comment CODE in the parsed file. |
References
Allen, Rosamund. 1988. 'The Date and Provenance of King Horn: Some Interim Reassessments.' In: Kennedy, Edward D., Waldron, Ronald & Witig, Joseph S. (eds.) Medieval English Studies Presented to George Kane. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. 99-125.
De Vries, Franciscus Catharina. 1966. Floris and Blancheflour: A Middle English Romance. Edited with Introduction, Notes and Glossary. Groningen: Drukkerij V.R.B.
McKnight, George H. 1901. King Horn, Floriz and Blauncheflur, The Assumption of our Lady. EETS o.s. 14. London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. (an updated version of an edition by Joseph R. Lumby, 1866) (available online)
Tassetto, Giulia. 2014. Translating and Rewriting: the Reception of the Old French Floire et Blancheflor in Medieval England. MA thesis Università Ca' Foscari Venezia. (available online)
Wells, John E. 1916. Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1400. New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. (available online)